Too Loud a Solitude: Landfills in the Landscape

Summary

In this paper, we examine the role of landfills in the construction of landscape. Landfills represent ambiguous spaces where material remains of human action are disposed and forgotten. They tend to be hidden from the view of persons passing by and only those who gone astray might encounter these blind spots on the map. Yet, landfills are well known to the professionals who plan and manage large amounts of waste to transform it into a new kind of assemblage that shapes landscape. In contrast to other parts of landscape, landfills show unprecedentedly stable growth. If we accept the view that landscape is materialised time, than landfills represent intriguing type of temporality converted to material form. In this paper, we use the combination of the phenomenological and garbological approaches to understand the spatiotemporal aspects of landfills, which are situated in different parts of West Bohemia (Czech Republic).

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage